If you strip away the purely economic aspects it is very much a question
of privacy - protection of the integrity of both work and artist.
The right to publish a previously unpublished piece of work is entirely
the author's or artist's. Warren & Brandeis found this to be fundamentally
a question of privacy when they wrote their article "The Right to
Privacy". During the 18th and 19th century it was very common that
manuscripts or letters belonging to writers or famous people were stolen
and published, which led to a couple of interesting cases, like Prince
Albert v. Strange (1849) or Pope v. Curll (1741).
Something similar happened as early as 1525 when Martin Luther's
Fastenpostille was stolen in manuscript form in Wittenberg and printed in
Nuernberg. The manuscript - nota bene - was not finished, so the published
book was not at all according to Luther's intentions.
/Karl-Erik Tallmo
>Copyright is specifically about the publication of a work, so I'm very
>confused by the claim that it is a privacy right.
>
>To me it seems related to privacy in the way that other property rights
>are. Defining domains of control for a private individual. That is
>diffrent from being a "privacy right" in itself. It is about encouraging
>distribution of information, not about controlling it. Privacy is about
>controlling the distribution of information.
>
>--
>Sincerely, Craig Brozefsky <craig {AT} red-bean.com>
--
_________________________________________________________________
KARL-ERIK TALLMO, writer, editor
ARCHIVE: http://www.nisus.se/archive/artiklar.html
BOOK: http://www.nisus.se/gorgias
ANOTHER BOOK: http://www.copyrighthistory.com
MAGAZINE: http://art-bin.com
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